Maya Bernau– American Author Project on Chuck Palahniuk

post 7

2008-03-30T22:23:00.000-07:00

This time I'm not really going to focus on one book but rather try to piece together some coherent things about all the ideas I have floating around in my head.

Between all the Palahniuk books I've read, Invisible Monsters, Coke, Survivor, Rant, Lullaby, Fight Club, and bits of Stranger Than Fiction and Haunted, I've got a lot of material to cover (in fact the only book I haven't read is Diary).

First of all I want to talk about love, I read somewhere that Palahniuk has called a lot of his book's romance stories, it is in fact true that they are " about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people." I don't know if I'd call it sad or ironic that ever romance story in all of his books fails. They all end badly, I'm not going to explain them all, but you'll have to trust me. In each one the protagonist never ends up with the lady, or in the case of Invisible Monsters the man.

In Lullaby Streator says
"There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them"

In Fight Club,
"That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways."

In Invisible Monsters,
No matter how much you think, you love somebody, you'll step back when a pool of their blood gets too close."

One more from Lullaby,
"This isn't about love and hate. It's about control...No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have your own way."

And a longer one from Survivor:
I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish six hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish. My parents bought me the first one to teach me about loving and caring for another living breathing creature of God. Six hundred and forty fish later, the only thing I know is everything you love will die. The first time you meet that someone special, you can count on them one day being dead and in the ground.

“anything you can acquire, is only another thing you’ll lose” (256) -Coke

Fight Club again, "Everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up trash"

Lullaby again, "Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a 100 years from now?"

Fight Club, "You don't understand any of it, and then you just die"

"This isn't really death" Tyler says, "We'll be legend. We won't grow old." I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires."(12).

His characters are all looking for something more, but they never find it.

"Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer...Maybe self-destruction is the answer"
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile"

Everyone wants to be unique, to find meaning, but what if it just isn't there.

I know I'm re-quoting some of my entries, but I'm trying to make my point.

The common themes in these quotes are nilism, isolation, destruction, and despair. But even as Palahniuk writes morbidly depressing sadistic stories, they remain also funny and sarcastic. They make it bearable to look at the world through his eyes and view how corporations, our materialism and 'distractions' have lead to our detachment, and we are all just calling for destruction. The only thing we have left is destruction because we will lose everything anyway.

"You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound. You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volumes. This isn't about music. This is about winning."

The only biodiversity we’re going to have” he says, “is Coke versus Pepsi”. Lullaby(115)

The topics he covers range from media corruption to biological pollution but in each one rings his pessimistic tone, we are headed for a dark future.

Post 6:

2008-03-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

I blasted my way through Fight Club, so once again, I have to cover the storyline of the entire book in one blog.

Fight Club is the book that sparked Chuck Palahniuk's career, namely the making of Fight Club into a movie starring Brad Pitt.

The book centers around a narrator, who is NEVER named, who hates his life and job (as a car recall analysis) . Consumerism has absorbed his life, forcing him to define himself by the furniture, clothes, and other material things that he owns. This dissatisfaction, combined with his frequent business trips across multiple time zones, disturbs him to the point that he suffers from chronic insomnia. When he goes to the doctor for it he refuses to give him medication and tells him to stop by the testicular cancer support group to "see what real suffering is like." After finding that crying at these support groups and listening to emotional outpourings from the suffering allows him to sleep at night, he becomes dependent on them. Eventually a girl named Marla Singer shows up, clearly a fake, which makes him feel exposed and he cannot cry while she is there and loses his comfort the groups provide him. Then the Narrator meets Tyler Durden, charismatic psychopath who works low-paying jobs at night in order to perform deviant behavior on the job (aka, defiling food as a waiter, and splicing porn into moives as a projectionist). After meeting Tyler he finally confronts with Marla and they split up support group nights, the narrator's condo (containing nothing but furniture from Ikea) is destroyed by an explosion and he asks Tyler if he can stay at his house. Tyler agrees, but asks for something in return: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." The resulting fight in a bar's parking lot attracts more disenchanted males, and a new form of support group, the first "Fight Club," is born. The fight club becomes a new type of therapy through bare-knuckle fighting, controlled by a set of rules:
1. You don't talk about fight club.
2. You don't talk about fight club.
3. When someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over.
4. Only two guys to a fight.
5. One fight at a time.
6. They fight without shirts or shoes.
7. The fights go on as long as they have to.
8. If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

Tyler then rescues Marla from a suicide attempt and beings a relationship with her that confuses the Narrator. The Narrator never sees them together and Marla seems totally unaware of the Narrator and Tyler's interaction. (in fact she seems to act as though they are the same person)

Tyler begins to use it to spread anti-consumerist/corporation ideas and recruits its members to participate attacks on corporate America. Tyler gathers the most devoted fight club members (referred to as "space monkeys") and forms "Project Mayhem," a cult-like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization. This organization, like the fight club, is controlled by a set of rules:
1. You don't ask questions.
2. You don't ask questions.
3. No excuses.
4. No lies.
5. You have to trust Tyler.

"As the narrator endeavors to stop Tyler and his followers, he learns that he is Tyler;[16] Tyler is not a separate person, but a separate personality. As the narrator struggled with his hatred for his job and his consumerist lifestyle, his mind began to form a new personality that was able to escape from the problems of his normal life. The final straw came when he met Marla; Tyler was truly born as a distinct personality when the narrator's unconscious desire for Marla clashed with his conscious hatred for her. Having come to the surface, Tyler's personality has been slowly taking over the narrator's mind, which he planned to take over completely by making the narrator's real personality more like his. The narrator's bouts of insomnia had actually been Tyler's personality surfacing; Tyler would be active whenever the narrator was "sleeping." This allowed Tyler to manipulate the narrator into helping him create the fight club; Tyler learned recipes for creating explosives when he was in control and used this knowledge to blow up his own condo.

The narrator is eventually forced to confront Tyler on the roof of a building. The narrator is held captive at gunpoint by Tyler, forced to watch the destruction wrought on the museum by Project Mayhem. Marla comes to the roof with one of the support groups. Tyler vanishes, as “Tyler was his hallucination, not hers.”

With Tyler gone, the narrator waits for the bomb to explode and kill him. However, the bomb malfunctions because Tyler mixed paraffin into the explosives, which the narrator says early in the book "has never, ever worked for me." Still alive and holding the gun that Tyler used to carry on him, the narrator decides to make the first decision that is truly his own: he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots himself. Some time later, he awakens in a mental institution, believing that he is dead and has gone to heaven. The book ends with members of Project Mayhem who work at the institution telling the narrator that their plans still continue, and that they are expecting Tyler to come back." (borrowed from wikipedia)

A completely different end the the movie, might I add.

The book is about destruction, and how our nature as consumers traps us, "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. But the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no mater what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug" (44).
"trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you" (44).
The story really beings when the Narrator's loses his attachments to all his 'things' and Tyler comes into the picture (later we learn that was set up by Tyler)

An early line in Fight Club is "You don't understand any of it, and then you just die" and good set up for the views on life and the world presented in this novel.

"This isn't really death" Tyler says, "We'll be legend. We won't grow old." I tongue the barrel into my cheek and say, Tyler, you're thinking of vampires."(12).
I can quickly relate this line to a few passages in Lullaby, when Helen says "Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a 100 years from now?"" Everyone just wants to leave a mark, do something important.

"..when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you're ever proud of will be thrown away...This is when I cry because right now, your life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion...It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero" (17).

The quotes cold come from the same book. The idea that everything is futile, it doesn't really matter what we do, is a much a theme in Palahnuik's books as is the feeling of anti co-corporation, and anti-society, and anit-technology age.

As the Narrator is talking about wishing planes to crash I'm having flash-backs to Survior, and Rant, then he says "If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up a a different person?" (33) and maybe it's just because it takes place on a plane, and he is praying for a plane crash, but it makes my mind jump back to Rant. Such is the way I've notice that Palahniuk's always overlap.

In chapter 6, the chapter that existed before the rest, as the short story that created fight club, the Narrator says "Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer...Maybe self-destruction is the answer" and this is what I've been noticing in every other book, destruction for creation, destruction for the better, constructive destruction, every book uses it, in a different manner maybe in a different theme, but it's there, you have to destroy yourself to become anything. "nothing is static. Everything is falling apart"(108).

In fight club, Tyler Durden preaches that you have to hit rock bottom, let go of you consumer life, strip yourself from you ikea apartment, burn yourself with lye, because you have to destroy yourself before you can get anything real. You have to break out of the cycle "My father never went to college so it was really important that I go to college. After college I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know. When I got a job and turned 25, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married."(51).

Another connection, "This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people though you were dying, they gave you their full attention...you had their full attention. People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak." in Invisible Monsters the Narrator (whose name you don't learn till late in the book either) says "the only reason people ask how your weekend was is so they can talk about theirs" I think it's interesting how close these two lines match up.

"Recycling and speed limits are bullshit" Tyler said. "They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed. It's project mayhem that's going to save the world.
A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant, or into remission long enough for the earth to recover...Project Mayhem will break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world...This was the goal, the complete and right-away destruction of civilization". (125) "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are teh same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile"(134) "What you have to consider, is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, Gob hates us This is not the worst thing that can happen...If you could be God's worst enemy or nothing at all, which would you choose? which is worse, hell or nothing?"(141). These are all the views of Tyler Durden, It's the same trends I've seen through the other books, Destruction as a means of creation, or redemption, to change our lives. The fact that nothing we do matters, maybe God doesn't care about us, I talked about all this when I wrote a post about Lullaby.

Isolationism, specifically directed towards material items and possessions, is a common theme. "I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions," Tyler whispered," because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit." Tyler later applies this view to the whole world through Project Mayhem.

Then Narrator agrees too, even though he fights the other side of his personality, he seems to think it's all worthless "How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up trash". (201).

In all the way Chuck Palahniuk looks at the world is not a very nice way to see it, but one can sympathize.

To quote the Afterworld, "Really what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was "apostolic" fiction -- where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a women. And one man, the hero, is shot to death. It was a classic ancient romance but updated to compete with the espresso machine" (216)

This quote, justifies why I picked Chuck Palahnuik as my American Author more then anything else. I think in many ways his novels characterize his era, or at least they capture it just about as accurately as Scott Fitzgerald could capture the 20's in the Great Gatsby.

In the end I think the almost post-apocalyptic views Palahnuik describes, the destruction he calls for, it really isn't too far off, humans really do seem bent on brining their own destruction, what with global warming and all but lets just hope that destruction in some perverted sense does lead to rebirth and renewal like Tyler Durden claims. Tyler Durden, and Oyster (from Lullaby) share many similar qualities on this note... Something to think about.

Palahniuk himself gives a much simpler assertion about the theme of the novel, stating "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people."

Post 5:

2008-03-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Stranger than Fiction, but as it is a collection of short stories I decided to only read a few and moved on to lullaby.

The parts of Stranger than Fiction I've read have been interesting, it has been interesting to see how each story relates to one of Palahniuk's published stories. It really does show that he bases his stories on his life experience, which is a little creepy. 'Confession in Stone' is about people who spend their lives building castles "Or maybe castle building is a reaction to the fast-paced short-lived spirit of our times" this is the SAME theme at the end of Choke, the story ends with everyone building a house out of stones, it's a strange ending but the characters regress away from society so much that the isolate themselves and dedicate themselves to this project. Again the theme that we are disconnected from our world is present as it is in almost any Chuck Palahniuk book.

The story 'Frontiers' is about using steroids, similar to the book Survivor to fit an image produced by media, another one of Chuck's negative commentaries about todays world.

I stopped reading Stranger than Fiction because it was like reading excepts that weren't good enough for the actual stories they were related to.

and I moved on to Lullabye,
Lullaye is one of those books that starts with the end, "Still, this isn't a story about here and now. Me, the Sarge, the Flying Virgin. Helen Hoover Boyle. What I'm writing is the story of how we met. How we got here." [p.9].

I've finished the entire book so I have a lot to cover as far as plot summary, so I'll try to keep it short.

The books beings with Carl Streator (although you don't learn his first name till much later in the book) who is a new paper report assigned to a story about the 'sudden infant death syndrome' he connects the deaths to a song in the book Poems and Rhymes Around the World. As Streator learns, the culling song has the power to kill anyone it is spoken to or even thought in the direction of. You also learn Streator's wife and child died in this manner. Streator unintentionally memorizes the deadly poem and he semi-voluntarily becomes a serial killer (killing, for example, annoying radio hosts and people who elbow into an elevator when he is late for work). He then turns to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who has also found the culling song. While she is unable to help him stop using the culling song, she is willing to help him stop anyone else from being able to use it again. The two of them decide to go on a road trip across the country to find all remaining copies of the book and remove and destroy the page containing the song. They are joined by Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, and Mona's boyfriend, an eco-terrorist named Oyster.
The culling song in it's original form is predicted to be part of a "grimoire", of forbiden spells, everyone is after this grimoire for their own desires, Oyster seems to want it for a sinister purpose, Helen wants power, and Streator wants to destroy it.

Mona eventually figures out that the datebook Helen had been carrying throughout the trip is the grimoire they had been looking for, written in invisible ink. In the end, the grimoire is used and misused until Helen's body ends up dead with her mind in a police sergeant's body, amoung the decoded spells is a spell that lets the users control another body and also one that can manipulate someones feelings (Streator thinks his love for Helen is due to this spell) and flight. This connection is made in the final chapters and concludes with the present; Streator and Helen (in the police sergeant's body) are together, searching for Mona and Oyster who have the entirety of the grimoire with the exception of the "culling song" and are gallivanting around the country creating 'miracles' .

Lullaby, is has what I think is perhaps one of the most depressing, hopeless, disparaging tones of all of Chuck's books. 1999, Fred Palahniuk, Chuck's father, began dating a woman named Donna Fontaine. Donna's ex-boyfriend, Dale Shackleford vowed to kill Fontaine as soon as he was released from prison. After his release, Shackleford shot Fred Palahniuk and Fontaine and they died. Chuck Pahahnuik testified against Shackleford and her received the death sentence. He wrote Lullaby as a way to cope with the events and his decision.

As is true with most of Chuck's book's the themes of the book are negative and deal with the negative aspects of society and destruction.

I'm going to pick out some quotes, and passages, and spew out my thoughts on them, as far as relating to the theme, and some possible thesis, here goes.

"Old George Orwell got it backwards. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and Dancing. He's pulling rabits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled...with the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world...There are worse things then finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you've tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease. All the nice clean books, music, television. Distraction...there are worse things you can do to the people you love. The music and laughter eat away at your thoughts. The noise blots them our. All the sound distracts." (page 19)

The narrator of the story always describes everything in detail, Because he notes everything around him, he is unable to escape the chaos that is everyday life. He believes that people have become ‘noise-aholics’ and he builds up a resentment towards humanity. This eventually plays a role in his quickness to kill after unconsciously memorizing the culling song. His annoyance with Society causes him to lash out at the small things.

"the suit she's wearing, the skirt is fitted to her hips. It's green, but not the green of a lime, but more the green of key lime pie. It's not the green of an avocado, but more the green of avocado bisque topped with a paper thing sliver of lemon, severed ice cold in a yellow severs soup plate. It's green the was a pool table with green felt looks under the yellow 1 bal, not the way it looks under the red 3" (pg 82).

The Narrator always describes the details about everything and gives a long explanation of color, many times he describes Helen’s various suits to the exact shade, that is until he finds her dying “The details of her suit are, it’s some color. It’s a suit. It’s ruined.”(251). I’m sure this change is symbolic, I can’t place exactly what it all means. This is the point where Streator realizes he loves Helen, I think he leaves behind his need to critique and note anything, because the women he loves is crazy and dying. he can't simply keep "looking closely" "and forgetting the big picture", because the big picture is that she is dying, and he can't ignore it.

"Don't you feel, somehow, buried in history?"..."Do you realize that anything you can do in your lifetime will be meaningless a 100 years from now?"..."Do you think a century from now , that anyone will even remember the Stuarts?".."Armoires are the cockroaches of our culture" (pg 51) Another trend in the book is just the feeling that nothing we do will matter, that it’s all pointless, a very depressing line of thought and in this way so true to Palahniuk’s sarcastic pessimistic world view.

“Through the walls come horses screaming and cannon fire. Either a brave, stubborn southern belle is trying to keep the union army from burring the apartment next door, or somebody’s television is too loud. Down through the ceiling come a fire siren and people screaming that we’re supposed to ignore. Then gunshots and tires squealing, sounds we have to pretend are okay. They don’t mean anything. It’s just television. An explosion vibrates down from the upstairs. A women begs someone not to rape her. It’s not real. It’s just a movie. We’re the culture that cried world. These drama-holics. The peace-ophobics” (94). This passage further elaborates the Narrators complaint of how people are disconnected from the word, how we surround ourselves with distraction. The culling song falls into this phenomenon, “Imagine a plague you can catch through your ears. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.” (41)

Palahniuk hints that Man has become addicted to the media. That this culling song, which was made to give peaceful death, can be turned around for mass murder, anything good can be destroyed and turned evil. Humanity can have all the best intentions, but the distorted perception of reality that determines their actions have resulted in a slow deterioration of society. Palahniuk suggests to his readers that the world is becoming addicted to its own destruction, again destruction is such a familiar theme for Palahnuik. In Rant people trying to escape their futuristic world by destroying themselves, in Fight club people escape their corporate jobs by trying to hit rock bottom, It’s the backwards cycle in which creation breeds destruction, and destruction creation.

A good example of Chuck’s writing, and how he uses ‘facts’ in his fiction, and also a good example of how even something like nature, can be a part of destruction:

What we think of as nature, Oyster says, everything’s just more of us killing the world. Every dandelion’s a ticking atom bomb. Biological pollution. Pretty yellow devastation. The way you can to go Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there’s a McDonald’s hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water Hyacinths. Startling. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out. “The only biodiversity we’re going to have” he says, “is Coke versus Pepsi”. (115) For some reason that line brings to mind a line from Fight Club, “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero”. In the same way they are both witty statements that reflect our culture and what it’s headed for. I’m really beginning to see why people criticize his books for sounding the same. They all carry that same vibe of loathing, hate for society, and the media, and what we’re becoming.

“There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them”

“In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime you have to make the victim your enemy. After long enough everyone in the world will be your enemy…more and more you imagine the whole world is against you.” I’m going to spend much time with this quote just throw it in there to support my ‘negative world view’ thesis. There is a part right after this, that talks about the talk show host that Streaton killed, about how maybe she used to be good, maybe she just got tired of helping people and getting the same calls “about unwanted pregnancies, divorces, about family squabbles…maybe she wasn’t always a bitch” This little passage is just emphasizing how disparaging the world is, and always hearing the negative sides to everything, bad news all the time, can turn you against it, you disconnect, this is really what happens to Helen and Streaton. The same example is later given with God, with the exact same worlds. A comment on the way our world seems to be headed.

A few more examples: “you ever wonder if Adam and Eve were just the puppies God dumped because they wouldn’t house train.”…”Maybe humans are just the pet allegations that God flushed down the toilet”(143). I think this one speaks for itself. Humans are hopeless, they create chaos, god gave up. Ect.

“And I say, that’s different. Humans are above animals. Animals were put on this planet to feed and sever humanity. Human beings were put on this planet to feed and serve humanity. Human beings are precious and intelligent and unique, and God gave the animals to us. They’re our property. “Of course you’d say that,” Helen says, “You’re on the winning team.” I say, constructive destruction isn’t answer I was looking for.” Constructive destruction is the perfect name for the theme in Fight Club, Rant, and now Lullaby. Destroy something for the good of something, or destroy yourself to be better. Destruction for the greater good. “Constructive destruction…condemning one innocent man so millions don’t die. Here’s every lab animal who dies to save a dozen cancer patients.”

I think my thesis, concerning this book would have to be Palahniuk's novels all sound so similar because he lets his own voice, and thoughts ring through them, it's always the same dark humor about society and our downfall.

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2008-03-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

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Post 4:

2008-03-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

I have just begun reading "Stranger Than Fiction" by Chuck Palaniuk. The book is a collection of true stories that have influenced his life and work.

The book is interesting to a point, but because it is about the stories that he created his stories from I feel like I am re-reading a lot of his books.

The introduction to the book contained a lot of insights to his writting style which I found very interesting, it starts off with "If you haven't allready noticed all of my books are about a lonely person loking for some way to connect with other people. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to so rich you can rise above this rabble, all those people on the freeway, or worse, the bus. No, the dream is a big house, off alone somewhere, Some lovely isolated nest wehre you can invite only the rabble you like...it never fails. We get there, and we're alone. And we're lonely. After we're miserable enough...we destroy out lovely nest and force ourselves back into the larger world. In so many ways that is how you write a Novel" (page XV).

I find this Extremely true about Palahnuik's writing, both the main characters of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters go through this same process, in different ways, but it's the same principle. In Fight Club the narrator burns down his ikea apartment and gets back in touch with reality through fights, in Invisible monsters the narrator destroys her beautiful face to end her isolation. (it's more complex then that, but for the sake of time...).

Each sotry I've read in "Stranger Than Fiction" I can directly connect to one of his Novels, except maybe the first. The second 'Where Meat Comes From' is about a wrestling club and how people are drawn to it as a causual sport, it just screams Fight Club. "You are Here" is about writers struggling to get their stories heard, and although I haven't read Haunted I know it fits a similar theme. The story also has some themes I can relate to many of Palahniuk's books, he says "It's no longer God waiting in judgment, It's the marketplace, maybe a book contract is the new halo. Our new reward for surviving with strength and character. Instead of heaven, we get money and media attention. Maybe a movie starring Julia Robers, bigger than life and pretty as an angel, is the only afterlife we get. And that's only if...your life, your story is something you can package and sell." This concept is in Survior, it's in Rant, it's the idea that society has been taken over by media, and technology and mass production, it's Chuck Palahniuk's sadistic cynical sarcastic world view. "Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angels. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the fist opportunity. A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of a movie and paperback potential. Where a story no longer follows as the result of an experience. Now the experience happens to generate a story." (page 35) the reset of this paragraph has some really interesting thoughts on writing as well.

The next chapter 'Demolition' is about people who participate in demolition derby's for combines, it is obviously and inspiration for party crashing in Rant. The drives in 'Demolition' praise their sport for it's excitement and escape the same way the nighttimers in Rant to Party Crashing.

I just finished reading 'Life as a Dog' which is a short story of Chuck and a friend of his dressing up as a Dog and Bear and running around in public places and the reactions they get. The idea of their 'experiment' is "what would it be like to live with attention? to just let people stare. To let them fill in the blank, and assume what they will." (56) ( which is similar to narrator in Invisible Monsters) the reactions they get, they don't care I don't give a shit. This dog could walk around this way forever. Walking taller. Blind and deaf to people's shit..It's the kind of cool, a feeling of being self-contained, that white guys can live a lifetime without" (page 60)

Chuck Palahniuk doesn't use a lot of symbols, her relies more on themes and directly addressing issues. In a sense he uses technology as a symbol for separation and corruption in stories like Rant where people disconnect from the real world by boosting ports, and in Survivor where the main character loses himself by becoming a hopped up on steroids media star. Also the symbol of destruction to get in touch with reality and fully experience life come up in Fight Club, Rant, and Invisible Monsters.

Week 3: No Prompt

2008-02-27T11:50:00.000-08:00

I finished reading Rant by Chuck Palahniuk over break. I have to admit I rushed quickly through this book because I wanted to know the ending. I've come to expect major plot twists at the end of Palahniuk books and this one was no let down.

To briefly describe the story I'm borrowing a quote from wikipeida:
Rant is told in the form of an oral biography. The main character, Buster Landru "Rant" Casey, is already deceased. Various people discuss their memories of Buster and the world he lived in, presenting stories that occasionally conflict. In the first sentence of the first interview, a character says he "didn't meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead," setting the stage for the convolutions later in the story.

The story beings with his friends, enimies and family recounting his childhood years in middleton. It's all very strange, Rant collects children's teeth and gives them historical coins worth thousands in exchange, because he has found a stash of them and knows if only he gets rich it will be suspicions. Rant is quite the high school Rebel but his childhood is really a result of his disturbed town. The entire book alludes to Rant caring rabies (because of his fascination with venom, he goes out in the the desert and gets snakes and spiders to bite him for pleasure also although it is only hinted at in the early stages Rant ends up creating a Rabies epidemic. "Any way you look at it, Buster was a hazard to have around playing Spin the Bottle" "In all fiarness I can't blame all the infections on that one boy, but we haven't had a singles cause of rabies since Buster Casey left town." As a friend says in the novel "History is, the girls Rant liked, he used to kiss. Boys, he took them out animal fishing. Both ways it was a test of your faith". Eventually he escapes his hometown and his father tells him that He is not really his father, and that when he meets a girl named "Echo Lawrence" he should kiss her for him. This entire scene only makes sense once the big twist at the end is reveled. His father successfully predicts his future when Rant runs into a gang 'Party Crashing' teens led by Echo. The city where Rant goes to is divided into Nightimers, and Daytimers. It a society where people 'boost ports' to experince already mapped out stories, much like book on tape, but with virtual reality, sounds, smells, and feeling. The Nightimers resort to Party Crashing as the last way they are able to have 'real' experiences. Party Crashing is a organized game of mayhem similar to bumper cars. Durring a certain window of time players with a flag on their care drive around searching for other participants to crash into. These flags can be anything, for example commonly used is a Just Married flag where participants dress in Bride and Groom outfits and after crashing stage large arguments in the street. "the Baby on Board" events used another type of mishap flag. Understandably public reaction was somewhat less jolly at the sight of a speeding car weaving through traffic with an infant carrier and baby seemingly forgotten on the roof. " (P. 154). As Rant falls in love with Echo we learn that Echo has a deformity (like many of Palahuink's characters) her arm and leg are deformed as a result of a car accident. We also learn that Party Crashing orginated as a government experiment testing the effects of Rubber necking on trafit accidents, and if people still looked if the gory details were announced on the 'graphic traffic, radio station.

As the plot unwinds more and more people develop rabies, and Rant dies in a horrible car crash but his body is never found. This is when the story starts to get crazy I'm not sure I can explain it because it doesn't entirely make sense to me. About the time Rant dies his father shows up in town knowing way more details about Rants life then he should. He shows up at Rant's apartment and meets Echo and goes home with her. We also learn that people crashing a car while in a given state of mind, jars a person outside of time. Rant has supposedly gone back in time. We also learn people have been using this trend to 'breed better versions of them self' which makes us recall Rant's super human smell. Green Taylor Simms believes that you can become a god if you go back in time and kill you parents before you are conceived because you create a paradox, you shouldn't exsit but you do. One character archives this, Wax who we learn about earlier in the story is this vision of perfect, everyone likes him and trusts time, as we learn about the time traveling theory it is clear he has been 'breeding himself (which basically means going back in time and having sex with your mother for several generations in till your genes become so concentrated that you are almost a super version of yourself...honestly i'm not really sure how the theory works, the book attempts to explain it, but fails) Anyway this Wax character manages to go back in him and kill his parents prior to his conception and the traces of him fade from the world, he is still alive, but there are no rerecords of him, and people can't remember why the police want him. Eventually we learn that Green Taylor Simms is one of these time traveling historians and is actually Rant's real father. He want's Rant to go back in time to kill his mother. This all is reveled after we learn Rant has crashed his car into the past announcing he loves Echo but has to go try to save his Mom. Simms follows him. It is reveled through his mom Irene, that Simms rapes her which is how she conceives Rant, but at the same time the Rant from the future comes back to try and stop Simms, but is too late, and he stays in the past to raise her child which is also himself, from there the story I assume runs in a loop with Rant growing up and trying to go back in time to save his mother, which explains why Rant's father tells him he is not really his father and knows so much about his future life.

Because the book is never really told from one point of view we never really get a solid picture of what happend, just as the entire time warp theory is explain Shot Dunyun, another party crasher says "Maybe people don't travel back in time. Maybe it's lies like tat, anything that smells better then the idea of death- black, inky, forever death - it's those kind of sexy lies that set up world religions. Maybe Rant is just dead". The last line of the book is of course so Palahnuik "The next Party Crash night anytime any godamm Maserati or Rolls-Royce pulls up to the curb, I'm climbing inside. The rest of you goddam losers -- enjoy your death.

The book contains a lot of backwards imagry. There is side plot involving children who look up to the Rabies epidemic and dayttimers that aspire to contract rabies from nighttimes, they discuss their 'lineage' claiming they descend from Rant. "every high school has their Romeo and Juliet, one tragic coupple. So does every generation"... a High school girl "expected her baby to be like part man part animal. Like on time she told me "I'm taking human evolution one giant step backwards". Essentially the story contains a lot of those 'backwards steps, and twisted realities, in Part Crashing "The furniture on the roof does not indicate a household being relocated. The Student Driver is not intended to protect a fledgling driver". "..Halloween as currently practiced in the U.S., on that particular evening the power hiarcy is inverted, permitting children to demand tribute of adults...Masquerading thusly, the children treater to inflict property damage as punishment for adults who fail to reward them"(p290). This is what the book calls Liminal Space, "
absurdity and paradox define regularity".

One of the main themes at the end of the book is reality, and how quickly it can change, every character give their version of how the world would change if the went back, then "You could argue that we constantly change the past, whether or not we actually go back. I close my eyes and the Rant Casey I picture isn't the real person. The Rant I tell you about is a filtered and colored and distorted through me. Like and boosted peak.
And all these ways I change my the past -- I don't even know I"m doing most of them. You could say I constantly fuck up the past, the present, and the future" (312).

I could go on from here about the theme of how everyone see's a person differently but that is so obvious in the 'oral biography' that I'm think I'm going to be doe.

Week 2: Favorite Passage

2008-02-13T18:36:00.000-08:00

"Come Christmas, foreign folks have tradition of baking a cake with a itty-bittty baby Jesus hid inside. Folds say the person who finds the Christ child we be special blesses in the next year. Just a little plastic baby-doll toy. But Irene Casey uses to fold into her batter as much scoops of Baby Jesus as she did flour and sugar. Put a Christ child in every bite. could be she only wanted more folks to feel lucky, but it never looked right, folks burping up whole packs and litter of naked pink plastic Savior's smiling face. Christmas potluck at the grange, and folks sitting at long tables with red crepe-paper decorations and those spit-covered Christ babies coughed up everywhere, it never looked all that holy. " Page 93

This passage is classic example of Chuck's writing style, although this is definitely falls on the less morbid and less gruesome side for his writing it still has those elements. "Rant" the book this quote is from is a satirical horror story. It is about a boy nicknamed Rant and how he created a rabies epidemic, Although the book is written as if it is a oral biography, all the 'people' who contribute to it are written by Chuck Palahnuik, and they almost all sound like they could be the same character, except for the changes in grammar they use. Palahniuk often creates bizzare horrific storyline, and characters which he expresses in a matter-a-fact manner so that by the end of the book the reader stops reacting to the gruesome details because they are writen in such a causal way. The language Palahniuk uses is very minimalistic, only a few adjectives are given to set scenes and is still able to paint scenes that are vivid in the mind, such as a Christmas table covered in pink plastic Jesus babies.

Week 1: American Author Proposal

2008-02-13T18:34:00.000-08:00

Writing Assignment #6 American Author Proposal

For my American Author project I would like to do Chuck Palahniuk. I was first drawn to this author when I read Invisible Monsters at the beginning of the school year. The book was unlike anything I’d ever read and it was really exciting to read, I couldn’t put it down. If fact after finishing the book I thought he would be a good candidate for the American Author paper because of his unique style.

I’ve also read another of his books called Survivor, and just between those two books I noticed a lot of parallels between them and his writing style. Palahniuk calls his style minimalist, he uses a lot of repetition, and sarcastic comment on today’s society and media, and his novels are generally very fast paced, with exciting plot twists which I like. His characters are intriguing and often have strange pasts and very nihilistic outlooks on like. Chuck Palahniuk books have become ‘cult classics’ he has developed a cult like following for his books (his fansite is called ‘The Cult’). His books have also raised controversy and generated mixed rewires. Many reviewers have criticized him for being purely a “shock writer” or for many of his books having similar styles and similar characters. I think because his books have generated a lot of response, both negative and positive he has obviously had a big impact of the literary world.
He has a wide selection of well-known books that I could read. I have read that his books fall into two categories, those written before Lullaby; Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke feature protagonist who have negative views about society, or feel detached from it and often react with self-destructive aggression. Fight Club is narrated by white collar worker about his rebellion from his desk job, Survivor about a death cult member who hijacks a plane, Invisible Monsters by a disfigured woman who uses her deformity to escape society. In these books the character that is narrating has a sadistic and cynical view of society. The books after Lullaby are satirical horror stories. All the books I have read fall into the first category so for my project I plan to read two from the second group so that I can compare his two types of style. I would like to read Lullaby which is Chuck Palahniuk wrote during the time he agreed to testify against the man who killed his father and girlfriend and sending him to death row. He said that he wrote the book to cope with his decision. I would also like to read Haunted, or Rant. Both of these books have very different styles, instead of being written as a narrative Haunted is a collection of poems and short stories that all relate to one central story. Rant is the story of Buster Landru "Rant" Casey but it is told after his death in the form of an oral biography comprised of many quotes from people who knew him. I would also like to read Choke which is the story of a con artist. Because I already know I like Chuck Palahniuk’s style I know I can read one of his books in about a week and a half , because I really enjoy his books I plan to get started right away so that I can possibly read more the 3 in order to have a wider range to talk about in my final paper.

Although there is no written biography about him he has a fansite and website which I’m sure will hold ample information to comprise a biography for him. I’ve already found a very strong literary criticism of his books by Laura Miller of that raised angered responses from his fans. She claims that “This problem is endemic to his novels: Everyone in them sounds like Chuck Palahniuk. They have one of two moods: gleeful, sloganeering wrath and sullen self-pity. Not surprisingly, this makes his work very appealing to teenagers and the sort of young man whose disaffection springs from hazy origins.” I think a lot of her critiques do have some truth to them, although they are extremely harsh, and I think it would be interesting to discuss them in my essay. Because his books follow a lot of common themes I think I would be able to write an analytical essay of his work, I’d also like to focus on how his views are portrayed in his books, and whether or not he holds the same views as his characters.